


How Beautiful Art Thou?

by orphan_account



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: 035 is a Thot, Gen, Light Angst, Original Character is Regeneratively Immortal, Original Character(s), Original Character-centric, just for fun, kind of simple, somebody puts on the mask
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 09:28:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18736285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: While the doctors sleep, containment is broken. SCPs make to escape, and one SCP, Ophelia, makes for danger.She is so bored, after all.





	How Beautiful Art Thou?

When the alarm first goes off, Ophelia is not wholly sure how to respond. Sure, she’s wanted to escape for quite a while, but how? It feels so sudden. Apprehension grabs her by the hand and tries to lead her away from the door, telling her it’s for the best. She knows she can’t be harmed by the breach, but still, she-

And then she’s out the door, out in the hallway, out in the light, flashing, flickering, red and white and washing the hallways in a flood of pigment, and the noise, by god the _noise_. Ophelia had been in that cell for so long, the noise of the alarm and the shouting and the shoes slamming on the floor nearly overwhelm her. It washes over her in inconsistent waves, loud and soft and scream and groan and crunch and pain. It’s the most she’s seen in so long, it’s so much, it’s so beautiful.

Doctors, D-Class and guards scatter past her like ants in a concrete anthill. She walks against the flow-even the guards are running past her, most likely to retrieve their weapons-in the hope of finding something interesting.

Other prisoners, ‘SCPs’, rush past her in all directions, a hive mind, a stream of consciousness with one collective goal-that of escape. Ophelia had stopped trying to escape some time ago. After all, for her, there’s nothing particularly interesting on the outside. Anyways, they’re just going to chase her down and chain her up again. She might as well check for something interesting, right?

She follows the signs in the hallway, right, left, right, right, door after door slammed open in a rush. She stops at one of the signs, an average red sign like any other at the Foundation, insignia in the background and blocky white letters reading ‘KETER’. She vaguely remembers a scientist calling her Thaumiel, when they still found her interesting and new enough to interview. Ophelia looks down the hallway, and decides on the nearest door to her left. It’s the smallest number she can see, and reads ‘SCP-035’. Start from the beginning, work your way up, hopefully find the most interesting thing you can in such a short amount of time. When she opens the door, the lab smells like a rotting corpse. Lab notes and clipboards and notepads litter the floor, a few flickering computers and dull, red emergency lighting show the door that the lab is protecting the world from.

The containment door is no longer locked-none of the are, it’s a breach, after all-but it’s sill shut, so whatever’s inside is probably an object. That’s kind of interesting for a Keter, which are supposed to be hard to contain. A short hallway and a second door lead to a room covered in dark brown fluid, a pattern obvious, but overlapping and nonsensical. The sludge leaks out, touches her ankle, and she watches as her body chases itself slowly, melting from the acid and trying to reform in its wake all at once.

In the center of the room there’s a worn glass box holding a mask. It’s white, she can tell this much, but she can’t tell many other details. Her regenerative abilities may be great, but when your eyes are constantly melting and reforming and readjusting to the light, it’s hard to see much. It slides through her vision as a comedy and a tragedy mask, looks like the paintings she’s seen of Greek actors playing out dramas in their elaborate masks.

And then the voice is splitting her skull, digging up her psyche like a kid in a candy store, rooting through her memory in a happy, frantic search. ‘ _A new one!_ ’ it says, sounding happy and hollow and everywhere and nowhere surrounding her. It’s rather disconcerting, even considering her long years spent on the earth. ‘ _The doctors finally forgiven my bad behaviors? Took them long enough!_ ‘ She struggles to find an answer, the physic voice overwhelming her. Well, at least she wasn’t bored anymore.

“W-What are you?” She’s stuttering now, leaning against the wall (bad idea, sludge is on her arm now), trying not to fall over as her knees give out and grow again in an instant.

‘ _Well! That certainly_ is _a question! I am, as you say, a ticket out, a new_ , _interesting experience. Hell, I’ve been alive even longer than you!_ “

She takes an uneasy step forwards, something in the back of her mind speaking to her. It’d be so easy, so nice, so new and interesting to put the mask on. And isn’t that what she wants? New, interesting, fun, to just not be bored? She’s a bored immortal and so are they, so what’s the harm? Won’t they stop this pain, the acid spilling from the floor into her overworked nerve endings?

Ophelia doesn’t feel it, exactly, but she’s shaking as if in a drug-induced haze, addicted and just needing a single taste. Gently, shakily, protectively, she lifts the glass case from the mask. It could still be talking to her, but she doesn’t really know, she doesn’t really care. The pains is too much, the mask is too much, so beautiful. It’s a ticket to seeing everything she’s wanted to see for so long. It’s her way out of the Foundation and out of the regular world and a deep, deep dive into something new.

And she’s lifting the mask.

She can feel the acid dripping on her face, blinding her with pain, is it really so much more pain, and  with darkness again and again and again.

Something else forces aside that backdoor voice and insists, loudly, that this mask will make her no longer Ophelia, no longer herself, nothing. But does that really matter? Should she really care?

And she’s lowering it down, novocaine flowing through her blood, brain addled with the thought of new and this and mask and out and experience.

And it...?

It was _wonderful_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I just kind of did this as a stupid fun thing, so I hope it wasn’t too bad.  
> I think 035 may be a bit OC, but I have trouble writing manipulative personalities so I enjoyed this as a bit of an exercise.  
> Kudos and comments are appreciated, and please point out any mistakes I’ve made!


End file.
